This invention relates to computer networks: More particularly, the invention relates to methods and systems for determining a routing topology of a computer network by obtaining and utilizing Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) routing information or Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) routing information.
Computer networks are growing in complexity and criticality. For example, a large corporation may support a computer network with tens of thousands of individual computers and thousands of network routers, hubs, repeaters or other network connectivity hardware. These networks are in many cases vital to an organization's functioning, and in some cases are mission- or life-critical.
Because of increasing network size and complexity, service provider networks (such as Internet service providers or application service providers) in particular are quickly growing beyond the ability of current methods to manage them. For example, the typical level of modification and reconfiguration in a complex service provider network is at best difficult and time-consuming to understand or document.
Although several commercially and freely available software packages attempt to address network complexity problems, and some theoretical work has been done in this field, effective solutions to comprehensive network management problems in complex networks remain elusive or non-existent.
Increasingly, the problem in a large, complex network is not a change in the actual physical topology. There are known methods for solving the problem of single points of failure and link layer failures. For example, protection switching on the SONET layer of a network, as known to one skilled in the art, can address physical topology management issues such as single-points of failure or link layer failures among other things. The automatic protection switching (APS) feature is supported, for example, on Cisco 7500 series routers and Cisco 12000 series routers, which allow switchover of packet-over-SONET (POS) circuits in the event of circuit failure, and is often required when connecting SONET equipment to Telco equipment. Here, APS refers to the mechanism of using a “protect” POS interface in the SONET network as the backup for a “working” POS interface. When the working interface fails, the protect interface quickly assumes its traffic load.
The problem in many service provider networks is the topology change produced by the routing protocols. Routing protocols and routing policies are how service providers control traffic and manage traffic across their network and with other service provider networks. For example, a large service provider network may have a relatively stable configuration of computing nodes and interconnection hardware, which can dynamically load balance a variety of incoming network traffic primarily through packet traffic rerouting. Thus, when one node on the service provider network is overwhelmed by traffic, software methods can be used to reconfigure routers and compute nodes so that incoming traffic is redistributed and congestion is decreased or eliminated.
The existing efforts in this area are concerned with discovering physical networks and physical topologies, not routing topologies. However, physical topologies alone do not necessarily provide a complete and accurate representation of the topology of information flow in a network or networks, which is affected not only by the topology but also by routing considerations. For example, even though a router may be directly connected to a particular network or networks, traffic bound for that network or those networks may never cross that router. The actual flow of packets through the network or networks is controlled by the routing protocols via techniques known to those skilled in the art of network management, such as, for example, route summarization (where an internetwork is divided into logical areas, with each area's border router advertising only a single summary route to other areas in order to reduce routing table size), route filters (where an additional metric rates relative reliability of individual networks as a source from which to determine optimal routes), and related routing polices.
As a further example, physical topology alone does not take into account information flow within a network as affected by multiple routers being directly connected to a particular network. How the traffic bound for that network is distributed, if at all, across those routers is a result of specific settings in the routing protocols. Thus, by changing settings in the routing protocols, traffic distribution, and thus routing topology, is fundamentally altered.
In terms of the ISO/OSI network model, (described in Douglas Comer's two volume work entitled “Internetworking with TCP/IP,” which is hereby incorporated by reference), previous work is focussed on understanding layer 2 and layer 3 topologies. The previous work does not analyze or take into account actual traffic flow.
While several commercial products for determining network topology are available, these products have serious drawbacks relating to their inability to take into account routing topology. For example, HP's Openview does not consider subnet masks. Other commercial products such as Riversoft's Openriver do not take into account routing protocols at all.
As recognized by the inventors, IGP information, such as may be obtained by IGP link state databases, may be particularly useful in determining routing topologies. However, the existing methods do not utilize IGP information in routing topology determination. Thus, there is a need in the art for a method of determining routing topology of a computer network, particularly in the context of complex networks, and for obtaining IGP information useful in determining routing topology of a computer network.